28. The Nightmare Scenario

Synopsis - Lucy has a bad dream and wakes up in a panic. Just then, the monsters in her dream break through the windows and attack her. She screams, only to wake up, once more. A dream in a dream, or had it ended?

I have had one of those, a dream in a dream. I can't quite remember what either dream was about.

This chapter makes one ponder about the truth of reality. Are we dreaming now? Have we woken up? Did we ever really wake up? 99.99% of us probably go through life as a sequence of consequential or planned events. We don't think about what else could be happening around us or to us or whether we were really in control. Deep questions, perhaps too soon.

The question of what is real is a big one. "I think therefore I am", "I feel pain, I must be alive", "All the world's a stage, and we are merely actors". Many schools of thought that helps us broaden our perspectives. Baggini mentioned creating a history on the spot. In his dream of the prairie and Pastor Green, he felt comfortable and sure. He could relate to his circumstances in his dream as if he had lived it. Extending that idea to the present, it begs us to consider whether what we are doing and feeling now is quite literally a figment of our imaginations. There is perhaps no answer.

Do we create historical links to prevent our emotions from going into a panic? How many times have you walked into a room and not recalled why you came in the first place? It makes us feel good when we establish that flow of events that eventually led to us standing in that room. "Ah, to get the scissors". Without the links, we'd think we must be going mad.

Watched the Matrix? Cool movie aside, it set the stage of thinking out of the box. In the film, humans were bred for energy and to keep their brains occupied, false realities were transmitted into their system (cable TV?) to ensure their brains and bodies were none the wiser. Just like when you dream. So do we need to find that red pill to get out of this false reality were in? Haha.

Then there is dejavu. It's spooky eh. But we can never explain it. Maybe we don't want to know why we're feeling that way. I had this theory about alternate timelines like in the TV series Sliders. Imagine that your dream self could jump timelines and live the future or the past and when you woke, you're in the present. Then dejavu would connect the multiple realities. Sounds like a film.

Is it worth it thinking that hard about our reality and whether we haven't woke from an elaborate dream or some alien experiment? We wouldn't be happy. So forget about it and have some hot cocoa.